Texas A&M lands major federal prize to become a vaccine mecca

The Texas A&M System has won a huge federal contract to become one of the nation’s major hubs of vaccine production and bioterror preparedness.

Over an expected lifetime of 25 years the federal contract to create a Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing is likely worth $1.5 to $2 billion.

Sharp.

“It’s the biggest federal grant to come to Texas since NASA, quite frankly,” Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp said.

The contract, announced today by U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, is remarkable for several reasons:

Politics: In an election year a university whose most famous graduate is Rick Perry, and which is the most conservative university in one of the reddest states, landed a major federal boon from a Democratic President.

Economics: During the next few years of construction the center will create about 1,000 jobs in the Bryan-College Station area. After the facilities are up and running many more well-paying jobs will come. There is also considerable promise for pharmaceutical companies to relocate to the Brazos Valley.

Engineering: Texas A&M has traditionally been known as an engineering and agricultural school. It has now successfully moved into the 21st century, an age of biology. With today’s announcement the university now becomes a major hub of bioengineering.

WHAT WILL IT DO?

So what will the center, one of three created today by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services do? There are four primary functions:

1. Provide a national response to a pandemic influenza outbreak: The centers are each tasked with providing 50 million doses to the government within four months of the identification of a strain. This would be about twice as fast as the vaccine making process during the 2009 outbreak of H1N1. The first doses must be available within 12 weeks. “Once it’s implemented, it really will solve the pandemic crisis,” said Dr. Brett Giroir, principle investigator of Texas A&M’s center.

2. Build the national countermeasure stockpile: The centers are tasked with developing advanced manufacturing techniques for all vaccine and medical countermeasures for chemical and biological threats, such as anthrax, antibody therapies, and treatments for radiation poisoning. The goal would be to speed up response to these kinds of incidents as well as pandemic influenza.

Dr. Barry Holtz, left, and Dr. Brett Giroir in a germination room in College Station. (Chronicle)

3. Accelerate the development of countermeasures: Bring together the expertise needed to expedite the movement of medical countermeasures to natural (i.e. Ebola virus) and manmade biological and chemical threats out of the lab and into the stockpile. This includes clinical trials. The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Baylor College of Medicine are important partners in this endeavor.

4. Workforce training: The centers must guarantee a capable U.S. workforce in this area because much of the industry is going offshore to China and other countries. “We can’t let the expertise fail in the United States,” Giroir said.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

Giroir, who came to Texas A&M in 2008 from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, deserves a lot of the credit.

Believing that the federal government was about to get serious about increasing its capacity to rapidly manufacture vaccines, Giroir urged the state of Texas to begin putting the pieces together for a successful bid.

He did so in large part by obtaining a $50 million grant from Gov. Rick Perry’s Texas Emerging Technology Fund, to build the National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing, a large complex that provides educational opportunities for students, as well as modular space for developing, testing and manufacturing vaccines and other drugs. It opened last fall.

The National Center for Therapeutic Manufacturing. (Texas A&M)

College Station may not be known for biotechnology, but the new facility fills a niche in the state economy, Giroir said.

Other state institutions, primarily affiliated with the University of Texas system, excel at basic research and clinical trials. In between, however, there is a scarcity of resources and space for taking lab breakthroughs, conducting animal tests and making large, quality-controlled batches of new medicines for clinical trials.

A&M’s veterinary school and engineering expertise will help ease and speed this “translational” phase of medicine development, Giroir said. The concept already has attracted interest, with UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center reserving one-sixth of the drug manufacturing space in the NCTM for the next 10 years.

An aerial view of the existing Texas A&M vaccine complex. (DHHS)

Giroir and Sharp also said they had critical support from state leaders.

“It begins with Governor Perry and his vision to establish Texas as the ‘third coast’ of the biopharmaceuticals industry,” Sharp said. “Over the past decade the State of Texas has methodically cultivated and grown the biopharma and technology industries in Texas, and the fruits of those labors are being born today.

WHY IS THIS NECESSARY?

It took about eight months to make the H1N1 vaccine after the initial swine flu outbreak in 2009, by which time tens of millions of Americans already had been infected and experienced mild symptoms.

“I don’t want to minimize this because thousands of people lose their lives, but it was a blessing because there could have been millions of lives lost,” Giroir told me last fall. “And it reinforced the need for our country to be prepared for this.”

The H1N1 outbreak prompted the federal government to speed up the vaccine-manufacturing process.

“We are launching a new initiative that will give us the capacity to respond faster and more effectively to bioterrorism or infectious disease,” President Barack Obama said in his 2010 State of the Union address.

That initiative led to a federal request for proposals to create two or three ”Centers of Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing.”

After a long process — Sharp characterized it as birthing a child — A&M got one of them, and has the only one led by an academic institution. The other two are led by Emergent BioSolutionsand Novartis. This is a big step toward hardening our country against the threats of influenza and bioterrorism.

@Jason – DARPA is not a group to naysay simply because it fails 80% of the time. The problems they are tasked with solving are so unbelievable and science fiction like, that not even the state of the art tech can accomplish them. But 20% of the time, they not only succeed, but wildly succeed. And the world is forever changed by what they invent.

The very internet you are reading/writing this on was a DARPA creation — the solution to the impossible problem of creating a communications system that could automatically reroute traffic to get around destroyed cities and comm hubs in the event of a nuclear attack. Today we think nothing of it. But when the problem was first brought up in the nearly all analog world of the early 60s, the idea of a wire magically knowing how to connect one phone to the other regardless of damage levels was very much sciFi.

So DARPA is one of those entities included that may fail some of the time, but the successes are worth the risk and cost. Somehow, Solyndra rings a bell. It is the only default in Energy Loan program. BTW, that loan process and restructuring began in 2006 or 2007 and was touted by the last administration.
Yep, we are going to have a few failures in order to keep up. And I don’t fault either administration for the default. There are many other factors that influenced the demise of that company. It’s not what the pundits tell us, but it keeps their ratings up.

The thought of entrusting anything having to do with public safety to the aggies concerns me greatly. After all, its not like they have a great overall track record when it comes to public safety. At the end of the day, I’m sure they will aggie this up.

Bold prediction – 20 years from now, College Station will not be a major global hub for vaccine production.

You sir are a moron of the highest degree. The biggest concern that I have is that you obviously either can’t read or have the comprehension of a baboon. “The concept already has attracted interest, with UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center reserving one-sixth of the drug manufacturing space in the NCTM for the next 10 years.” Not to mention the interest by Baylor College of medicine.

People like yourself are an embarrassment to humans. Please just retire from the internet.

That’s a wrong prediction. I’m a Longhorn, but I can acknowledge that the Aggies knocked this one out of the park, in an election year no less, and have taken a big step forward today as a university system. About $100 million will be flowing into A&M every year in just federal money for this kind of work, and there will be considerable private investment as well.

what the heck does that even mean? I attend Texas A&M, and find your comment to be very offensive. We are one of the top 20 public universities in the nation, and well on our way to being #1. A few years from now, when you hear names like UC Berkeley, Harvard, Los Alamos National Labratory, you will automatically think of Texas A&M University and College Station.
Aggies have the spirit and the know-how to get things done RIGHT.

Bob – You might want to learn something about A&M and not base your opinion of the entire university on 50 year old stereotypes. Do you like it when people from the Northeast assume we all wear cowboy hats and ride horses to work?

You’ll have to take what Bob said with a grain of salt. He’s a 34 year old community college dropout who profess to be an expert on just about everything. Its a shame there isn’t a vaccine or cure for stupidity.

Congratulations to the team that made this possible. They earned this, and did it the right way: by making an overwhelming case for the center to be located here, due to the current level of development and the potential for future growth.

I look forward to their work enabling generations of Cowboys to say “See – I told you that they were just hyping the pandemic” by preventing the worst-case scenarios from coming to pass.

“•Politics: In an election year a university whose most famous graduate is Rick Perry, and which is the most conservative university in one of the reddest states, landed a major federal boon from a Democratic President.”

When you are not writing for the chron do you serve as a parrot spouting Tea Party Republican whines?

Not sure I understand the reason for the criticism. A&M officials were concerned about the political implications of their bid. To the President’s credit, politics appear to have not played a role in this decision.

Eric — I respectfully disagree. Given the sad reality of a lack of solid science and enormous regulatory bias, more and more people are stopping to think twice about vaccine safety. It is my opinion the current administration is setting the table toward making A&M their scapegoat in case of the very real possibility the vaccine issue has the government eating crow in the next ten to twenty years.

“During the next few years of construction the center will create about 1,000 jobs in the Bryan-College Station area. After the facilities are up and running many more well-paying jobs will come. There is also considerable promise for pharmaceutical companies to relocate to the Brazos Valley.”

That can’t be right. Government spending doesn’t create jobs, only tax cuts for rich guys does that.

Not only is it Federally Funded, it is using Texas TAX DOLLARS to build the facility and MOST Texas citizens never heard about it.

Yes, that Texas Emerging Technology Fund is our tax dollars that are
under the direct control of Rick Perry. $50,000,000 FIFTY MILLION went to the grant to build the complex at College Station. The Natl. Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing is AGAIN your tax dollars. The Feds, no doubt, loved the idea that Texans would pay for the building.

This was a controversy in Jan., 2009 when Rick Perry approved the tech grant WITHOUT seeking the approval of the 17 member advisory panel.

This Fed. control and using tax dollars is so contrary to Texan voters. Wonder what changed their minds?

This is fantastic news – way to go A&M. Vaccine manufacturing (particularly for the flu) is still mired in 1950s technology and hopefully this will bring it into the 21st century.

I will take one exception with the article Eric – A&M has long had excellent basic biology programs, particularly microbiology which is key to their vaccine expertise (I have no connection to A&M, by the way).

1) Apple’s campus isn’t on UT’s campus.
2) Texas is investing (WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS) over $20 million dollars
3) You’re comparing apples and oranges (no pun intended). Apple moving there won’t bring in other companies. It’s also not university affiliated nor is it worth something to humankind. Austin can brag about their iPhones and B/CS can brag about the new vaccines they’re making.

One problem is that tamu never addressed the failures in their leadership or culture that rewsulted in the deaths of innocent kids when the bonfire stack collapsed.

Using political leverage to ensure the failure in leadership that resulted in the deaths of 12 kids doesn’t create the environment that makes Texans comfortable with entrusting tamu with national security issues.

The failure of leadership that resulted in the deaths of students 13 years ago rightfully makes many of us concerned that the same failures of leadership will cost more innocent Americans their lives. Until tamu convinces us the failures of leadership endemic to their university have been addressed, how can any of us entrust our safety to these people?

This is beyond ridiculous. Referring to the Bonfire tragedy to disparage Texas A&M as a research institution is a reach, to put it mildly. These two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and it saddens me to think that people like this exist. I am thankful that no one with this level of mental inadequacy appears to have been involved in the decision-making process.

Congratulations to Texas A&M and the B/CS area. This is a great step for the region and the State of Texas as a whole.

“There were 20,229 Aggies who served in World War II. Of these, 14,123 served as officers, more than any other school, including the combined totals of the United States Military Academy and the United States Naval Academy”

Aggieland developed those leaders and the ones fighting the wars of the past ten years. So, I’m sure if you can trust Aggie leadership to preserve your freedoms, then their leadership in other, less important areas, is sufficient to say the least.

Exactly. In a climate of horrific scientific methodology and regulatory bias with regard to vaccines, why did a Democratic administration allow this to go to a conservative school in a red state?
One word:
SCAPEGOAT

What was the old Barry Switzer comment when he was at OU–’I want to see a university our football team can be proud of.” Glad to see ANY Texas school make a big splash in the news for positive endeavors outside of the athletics arena. A&M has long been the butt of many jokes–a lot of them started by Aggies–but they are making great strides in improving their image and influence across the board. But of course, I still want to see the Aggies BTHO their new SEC foes!

Thank you, President Obama and Mrs. Sebellius, for entrusting this politically counterintuitive – and very practically important project to a conservative university that deserved it. This wasn’t about politics – which sucks for those who want to make it so.

Hopefully when we vote Obama out of office this will be recinded and the money used to reduce taxes. The wealthy will gladly ante up their saved dollars for research instead of something wastfull like football.

This is fantastic news for those in the biotech industry living in the area. The biotech opportunities in the Houston area are severely lacking. I am currently looking for a job in biotech and there are not many to be had. Way to go A&M!
Thanks for the great article Eric (as always)!

This facility could have been built anywhere in Texas. However, Perry used the Texas Emerging Technology Funds (without approval of 17 members) to provide a grant for the building to the tune of $50 million $$$ of Texan’s tax dollars. No way he was going to let it be built anywhere else. Got it???

I’m not begrudging the biotech research that will hopefully the advancement will be effective world-wide.
In 2007 Texas passed overwhelmingly in favor of $3 BILLION tax dollars to CPRIT (Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas. Now, if you are interested, you can check out the questionable grant awards on that one. There’s plenty of info since it’s very recent.

Texas A&M “is the most conservative university in one of the reddest states”; really? As conservative as it is (along with its twin cities of Bryan/College Station), that honor would seem more fittingly applied to Baylor, not to mention such bastions of faith and intolerance as East Texas Baptist and Texas Lutheran. Come on: TAMU maynot win any awards for cultural or racial diversity but there are many far darker spots in the state.

I have a son pursuing a science degree in his third year at Baylor and have found it to be generally accepting of other faiths, cultures and ideas. BTW, I’m a northerner and a centrist by birth, and wouldn’t ever say based on our family’s experiences that Baylor was a restrictive, intolerant environment. My son loves it there.

Texas A&M has traditionally been known as an engineering and agricultural school. It has now successfully moved into the 21st century, an age of biology. With today’s announcement the university now becomes a major hub of bioengineering.
—————-
Isn’t agriculture…biology? What is she talking about? They’ve already been a leader in bioengineering – agriculture.

As a retired U.T. employee, I don’t have any inside information on this issue, but I do know this is a very Big-Deal biomedically and I do know that TAMU and M.D. Anderson have worked closely together for many years on basic cancer research and cancer diagnosis and treatment projects. This particular development and TAMU involvement in biomedical technology has not appeared out-of-the-blue.

It’s going to be funny one day when everybody realize that all it takes is dirt cheap vitamin d supplement at the right dosage to prevent flu pandemic… We’re slowly getting there. A lot of vaccines are developed as a result of widespread vitamin d deficIency ESP flu… It’s not that hard to figure it out. Of course, it’s all about $$$ just like that phony CO2 thing.

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